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Hillary Clinton testifies on Benghazi, cites new security steps

By Michael R. GordonThe New York Times

Posted:
01/24/2013 12:01:00 AM MST

Updated:
01/24/2013 02:12:09 AM MST

WASHINGTON — In long-awaited testimony, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday asserted that she had moved quickly to improve the security of U.S. diplomats after the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans and prompted a scathing review of State Department procedures.

"As I have said many times since Sept. 11, I take responsibility," she said in a prepared statement. "Nobody is more committed to getting this right. I am determined to leave the State Department and our country safer, stronger and more secure."

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the morning in what might have been one of her last major public appearances as secretary of state, Clinton sought to avoid the controversy over whether the attack was the work of terrorists that dogged Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She suggested that she was inclined to see the attack as a terrorist act from the start.

"The very next morning, I told the American people that heavily armed militants assaulted our compound and vowed to bring them to justice. And I stood with President Obama as he spoke of 'an act of terror,' " she said.

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In a rare moment of confrontation, Clinton responded to persistent questions from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., by saying that there was too much focus on how the Benghazi attack was characterized in its early hours and not enough on how to prevent a recurrence.

"What difference at this point does it make?" she said, raising her voice and noting that there were "four dead Americans."

"It is our job to figure out what happened and to make sure it doesn't happen again," she said.

After jousting with Republican senators at the morning hearing, Clinton testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the afternoon. Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., who is the chairman of the House panel, set the tone for that session by rejecting the assessment by an independent State Department review that the fault for the inadequate security in Benghazi lay principally at the assistant secretary level.

"This committee is concerned that the department's most senior officials either should have known about the worsening security in Benghazi — or did know," he said.

In her testimony to the Senate committee, Clinton asserted that she was never made aware of the security requests from Benghazi by Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and his subordinates. "I did not see these requests," she said. "They did not come to me. I did not approve them. I did not deny them."

She insisted that the measures she was taking would ensure that requests received high-level attention in the future. In her prepared testimony, Clinton sought to put the events in Benghazi in a broader regional context, noting the presence of an al-Qaeda-affiliated group in northern Mali. "Benghazi didn't happen in a vacuum," she said.

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